Gordon Scott writes: > >Wrong! Varroa is new to Apis melliferra. Varroa and Apis _cerana_ >have been coexisting, at present A.M. cannot do so. I wonder what the strategies are that apis cerana has developped for dealing with the mites. Are they biochemical or behavioural? Is it possible to cross breed the two species (possibly using artificial insemination)? This would be a pretty drastic path to a solution given the years of breeding that have led to present a. melifera, but constantly exposing the bees and honey to toxic chemicals is a pretty drastic path to follow also!!! I have only been keeping bees for eighteen years but I have seen natural selection operate quite quickly on my hives. I haven't really selected for honey production. I have a ready and closeby pollination market because I am in the midst of a blueberry area. The bees used to come from Florida until the border was closed because of mites (tracheal at that time!). I always tried to winter them, but only about two thirds would survive. Then the bees came from New Zealand or Australia which are mite free, but they still didn't seem that comfortable with Canadian winter. The last few years I haven't had to buy any packages and I've been able to increase my colonies by 50 % each year and still harvest considerable honey. The bees that couldn't winter here under my lax management died. Those that could survived and increased. I may have improved my wintering techniques a little by improving ventilation, but I attribute most of the bees survival lately (95% last winter, and haven't found a dead colony so far this winter out of 160) to natural selection, because I haven't been selecting. So the selection pressure has been on survival and the ability to multiply (I hate to admit it, but I've been so busy with my dairy farming that I just divide the hives that are getting too strong or starting to make swarm cells.) Anyway, to get back to the mites: It seems to me that as long as people keep using chemicals that natural selection cannot operate. Yet I admit that most beekeepers need to use chemicals to keep their bees. Maybe what is needed is a few fairly isolated areas where the beekeeper(s) do not use chemicals and the only selection is for survival. Other beekeepers would have to keep sending bees into this area, because most of them would keep dying from mites. That would be the beekeepers contribution to the program that Roy keeps talking about. Nobody is going to stop using chemicals because his or her bees are going to die. But if we kept sending bees to this "selecting area" from all over the continent, then maybe the odd hive might survive. And that is what we would have to breed from and then cross breed with bees with superior traits and send the daughter colonies back into the the selection area. It isn't easy, but I don't see how the traits can be selected for otherwise. My two cents worth Stan Sandler p.s. I just read Diana Sammataro's letter, and that answers some of my questions about the mechanisms {known) for mite resistance. I wonder which of these apis cerana is using? This message printed with 100% recycled electrons.